James Cameron Starlog Interview

8/14/2019 James Cameron Starlog Interview

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James Cameron's

responses to ALIENScritics

JAMES CAMERON is the writer/director of ALIENS. Previously, he

co-wrote (with Gale Anne Hurd) and directed The Terminator. His

first film as director was Piranha II: The Spawning. Cameron's

other filmmaking credits include Rambo: First Blood II (as co-

writer), Battle Beyond the Stars(as art director), Escape from

New York(as special FX co-supervisor) and Planet of Horrors(as

production designer/second unit director). Interviews with

Cameron have appeared in STARLOG #89 & 110 and FANGORIA #56. A

previously unpublished Cameron interview, conducted after ALIENS'

release, appears in THE BLOODY BEST OF FANGORIA f6. This essay,Cameron's reply to readers' letters on ALIENS, was addressed to

the Communications department but is published here as part of

the ongoing SF professionals' forum, Other Voices.

by James Cameron

As the writer and director of ALIENS, I naturally prefer the sort

of cogent criticism contained in Lisa Snyder's letter (STARLOG

#116) stating "ALIENSis perfect!" However, since there were 11other letters in the same issue containing complaints of flaws in

logic, accuracy and aesthetic execution, I thought I would take

this opportunity to reply en masse.

I will take them in the order they were printed. First, Peter

Briggs, who seems otherwise to be a fairly well-researched

student of ALIEN, points out incorrectly that "LV-426 is a ringed

planet." The unnamed planetoid harboring the alien derelict ship,

to which I gave the designation LV-426, was in fact a moon of a

ringed gas giant, which was occasionally glimpsed in the sky in

ALIEN. The gas giant does not appear in ALIENS because theexterior scenes on LV-426 have an unbroken cloud cover or

overcast, and the space scenes are handled in a cursory manner,

advancing the story without dwelling on the wonders of

interstellar travel, which so many other films have done so well,

as their primary raison d'etre. You might say we approached

LV-426 from the other direction, and the ringed gas giant

companion was out of frame.


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Briggs' next problem was "Why do the colonists not pick up the

derelict SOS?" by which I assume he is referring to the acoustic

beacon broadcasting a "warning." As some readers may know, scenes

were filmed but cut from the final release version of the film

which depicted the discovery of the derelict by a mom-and-pop

geological survey (i.e.: prospecting) team. As scripted, they

were given the general coordinates of its position by the manager

of the colony, on orders from Carter Burke. It is not directly

stated, but presumed, that Burke could only have gotten that

information from Ripley or from the black-box flight recorder

aboard the shuttle Narcissus, which accessed the Nostromo's on-

board computer. When the Jorden family, including young Newt,

reach the coordinates, they discover the derelict ship. Since we

and the Nostromo crew last saw it, it has been damaged by

volcanic activity, a lava flow having crushed it against a rock

outcropping and ripped open its hull. Aside from considerations

of visual interest, this serves as a justification for the

acoustic beacon being non-operational.

Briggs' idea that the company had already discovered the derelict

is therefore unnecessary and would invalidate Carter Burke's

motives for attempting to bring back a sample of the organism for

study, and using such drastic means to do it.

The missing scenes also provide a more solid connecting link in

the process of the colony's infestation. We see Russ Jorden

dragged back to their vehicle by his wife with a "facehugger"

parasite attached to his face. We see the wife call the colony

for a rescue party. It's fairly simple extrapolation to assume

that the progress of the organism through the enclosed and

isolated population of the colony followed much the same course,

on a greater scale, as the life cycle of the original Alien on

board Nostromo.

These scenes, as well as four or five others, which would

certainly be of interest to fans, will be restored for the ABC

airings of the film and, if all goes well, in a "special edition"

videocassette, running roughly 12 minutes longer than the release

of 137 minutes. No confirmed release date is set for either of

these, but stay tuned.

Briggs' next beef is with the Alien Queen, and for several

reasons. His contention is that she destroys the original

intention of the missing scene in ALIEN. This is perfectly

correct, but I find it somewhat irrelevant since as an audience

member and as a filmmaker creating a sequel, I can really only be

responsible to those elements which actually appeared in the


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first film and not to its "intentions." ALIEN screenwriter Dan

O'Bannon's proposed life cycle, as completed in the unseen scene,

would have been too restricting for me as a storyteller and I

would assume that few fans of ALIENSwould be willing to trade

the final cat-fight between the moms for a point of technical

accuracy that only a microscopic percentage of ALIENfans might

be aware of.

In my version of the Alien life cycle, the infestation of the

colony would proceed like this:

1. Russ Jorden attacked, they radio for rescue.

2. Rescue party investigates ship...several members

facehuggered... brought back to base for treatment.

3. Several "chestbursters" free themselves from hosts, escape

into ducting, begin to grow.

4. Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an

immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to

become a new queen, while males become drones or warriors.

Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males...

or biochemically sense that a queen exists and change into males

to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of

the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg

incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the

males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac. The drones

and warriors also secrete a resinous building material to linethe structure, creating niches in which they may lie dormant when

food supplies and/or hosts for further reproduction become

depleted (i.e. when all the colonists are used up). They are

discovered in this condition by the troopers, but quickly emerge

when new hosts present themselves.

Thus, even with the Queen's vast egglaying capacity, the Aliens

are still a parasitic form, requiring a host from a different

species to create the warrior or Queen stages of the life cycle.

Since the warriors are bipedal with two arms (H.R. Giger's

original design), it may be inferred that the facehugger is anundifferentiated parasite, which lays an egg inside a host, but

that the resulting form (chestburster through adult) has taken on

certain biological characteristics of its host. This would

account for the degree of anthropomorphism in the design.

One admittedly confusing aspect of this creature's behavior

(which was unclear as well in ALIEN) is the fact that sometimes


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the warrior will capture prey for a host, and other times, simply

kill it. For example, Ferro the dropship pilot is killed outright

while Newt, and previously most of the colony members, were only

captured and cocooned within the walls to aid in the Aliens'

reproduction cycle. If we assume the Aliens have intelligence, at

least in the central guiding authority of the Queen, then it is

possible that these decisions may have a tactical basis. For

example, Ferro was a greater threat, piloting the heavily armed

dropship, than she was a desirable host for reproduction. Newt,

and most of the colonists, were unarmed and relatively helpless,

therefore easily captured for hosting.

Please bear in mind the difficulty of communicating a life cycle

this complex to a mass audience, which, seven years later, may

barely recall that there was an Alien in ALIEN, let alone the

specifics of its physical development. I had a great deal of

story to tell, and a thorough re-education would have relegated

ALIENSto a pedantic reprise of Ridley Scott's film. The audience

seems to have a deepseated faith in the Aliens' basic nastiness

and drive to reproduce which requires little logical rationale.

That leaves only hardcore fans such as myself and a majority of

this readership to ponder the technical specifics and construct a

plausible scenario.

Kelly Godel deplores the Aliens as "lame, weak and shameful

follow-ups to their predecessor." A careful analysis of both

films would show that the adult warrior (my term for the single

adult seen in ALIEN) has the same physical powers and

capabilities in ALIENSas it did previously. Since the Nostromo

crew were unarmed, with the exception of flamethrowers (which we

never see actually used against the creature), the relative

threat was much greater than it would be to an armed squad of

state-of-the- art Marines. One, crazed man with a knife can be

the most terrifying thing you can imagine, if you happen to be

unarmed and locked in a house alone with him. If you're with 10

armed police officers, it's a different story.

We set out to make a different type of film, not just retell the

same story in a different way. The Aliens are terrifying in their

overwhelming force of numbers. The dramatic situations emergingfrom characters under stress can work just as well in an Alamoor

Zulu Dawnas they can in a Friday the 13th, with its antagonist.

Jim Ficken discusses plot lines for ALIEN III but I can't

comment, since Gale Hurd, the producer of ALIENS, and myself have

decided to move on to other things and leave a third film to

others.


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Ben Smith asks where the Aliens originated. In dialogue, I have

Ripley specifically telling a member of the inquiry board, "I

already told you, it was not indigenous, it was a derelict

spacecraft, an alien ship, it was not from there." That seems

clear enough. Don't ask me where it was from... there are some

things man was not meant to know. Presumably, the derelict pilot

(space jockey, big dental patient, etc.) became infected en route

to somewhere and set down on the barren planetoid to isolate the

dangerous creatures, setting up the warning beacon as his last

act. What happened to the creature that emerged from him? Ask

Ridley. As to the purpose of the Alien... I think that's clear.

They're just trying to make a living, same as us. It's not their

fault that they happen to be disgusting parasitical predators,

any more than a black widow spider or a cobra can be blamed for

its biological nature.

David R. Larson makes some interesting comments and yes, the

design of the "warrior" adult was altered slightly. His rationale

for this is as good as mine (that the individual in ALIENnever

reached maturity).

Daniel Line asks more questions about the derelict which, as a

writer, I could provide plausible answers for, but they're no

more valid than anyone else's. Clearly, the dental patient was a

sole crew member on a one-man ship. Perhaps his homeworld did

know of his demise, but felt it was pointless to rescue a doomed

person. Perhaps he was a volunteer or a draftee on the hazardous

mission of bio-isolating these organisms. Perhaps he was a

military pilot, delivering the alien eggs as a bio-weapon in some

ancient interstellar war humans know nothing of, and got infected

inadvertently. "How could the man who went onto the derelict not

know something was wrong when he saw the dead gunner?" Well,

Dallas, Kane and Lambert saw the dead gunner and that didn't stop

them. Human curiosity is a powerful force. As for the equipment

left behind by the Nostromo crew being a deterrent, this requires

that Jorden and the other colonists enter the derelict through

the Freudian main door. In ALIENS (long version), they enter

through a large rent in the hull caused by damage from the lava

flow, going directly into the egg chamber level.

Abbas Rezvi takes exception to Ripley's ease of adjustment to 57

years of technological change. First of all, ask yourself if an

intelligent and willful person from 1930 could or could not adapt

to the technology of 1987, given a few months of training. They

had automobiles (including traffic jams), machine guns and

airplanes then, only the specifics are different now. Conversely,


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however, who could have dreamed of the impact of computers and

video on our current environment? A second point is that there

have been 57-year periods in history where little or no social or

technological change took place, due to religious repression,

war, plague or other factors. Perhaps technology had topped out

or plateaued before the Nostromo's flight, and the changes upon

Ripley's return were not great. You decide. It doesn't bother

Ripley, and it doesn't bother me. I hope this answers a few of

your readers' concerns. I would like to thank STARLOG for its

support of our film through articles ("Viva Vasquez"), movie

books, etc. We'll keep you posted on upcoming projects, several

of which are science fiction.

By the way, it's not in the goddamed cat and it's not in Newt,

either. I would never be that cruel. []

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James Cameron Starlog Interview